


Eventual

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Study, During Canon, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Undeath, Of An Elder Abomination, Post-Canon, Reality Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28137225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: The rest will be easy.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Eventual

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FireEye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FireEye/gifts).



The rest will be easy.

On the other side of stone and magma and time and distance intercut and cut through each other, Mantorok hears without ears and observes as the pack of humans assemble in its followers’ unwitting shrine over the ruins of Ehn’gha. Some of its own agents, summoned long before the binding, are intermingled - as unseen diplomats, it thinks with flat matter-of-factness - with human enforcers, around the mangled and decapitated body of Edward Roivas.

In the time it takes for but a fraction of a count of its endless eyes to blink, the Roivas manor, from the ground up, is empty but for two.

Alexandra Roivas has come home, and has joined the agent that calls itself Inspector Legrasse.

The brain the agent holds contains regrets.

The agent cannot help but emit its sighs and toss its head at the cool, dull ache that comes from its necessary work - there is discomfort in having been the one to lure Alexandra here, in it and its fellows having rendered bloodstain trails as if they had never existed, in it only obfuscating and never revealing the answers its master holds.

These creatures made of its own raw magic have no choice but to be loyal. Mantorok reminds it without a move or a pulse of consciousness that even without guidance, Alexandra will carry out the remainder of their plan with no more doubt than there is that a round stone will reach the pool at the bottom of the slope down which it skips and tumbles.

The agent knows this, and with the reminder, the discomfort it feels in the brain called Legrasse dies to the knowledge that the girl will have her closure.

Minute ripples over the surface of the earth make Mantorok’s flesh quiver. Michael Edwards is moving southeast.

The Ancient blinks again. Alex is no longer attended in the house, because she doesn’t need to be. As was inevitable since the others’ Essences were enshrined, destined themselves to each be thrice-stolen, she has done what she has been good at since she was an even smaller creature.

Fifteen years ago all over again, an ichor bubble pools on Mantorok’s skin bursts. Black gas is absorbed into the air and breathed in by a man behind the wheel of a car; a woman lying in the hospital. Mantorok forced nothing to happen. It watches Alex go through her training in puzzlery, in exploration of the house; Edward, in a ghost-image, leads the way, like a four-legged thing leads a cub in hunting as play.

Mantorok watches as she opens the door to the place where the Tome is kept. It blinks again, the only gesture of contentment it can make, and then again, sagely, as it feels and envisions Alex moving, beginning to gather the tools to which it points.

As the mansion is turned away from the sun, Michael deposits an _extra_ , and Mantorok pulses as if it could laugh. This was his own choice, and not _its_ own, and Mantorok feels its affection for humanity whirling through its consciousness - such complements to its own domain of entropy, with all of their own design that they fit between such inevitabilities as death; how they fill empty spaces with such _active_ change and forward movement, to such an extent that they smothered out the first of Mantorok’s foes long ago, last human who knew the name of its rune dying 1,186 years ago and driving its cult down into stale tombs where they belong.

Perhaps he will provide further gifts and trinkets to Mantorok’s pawns and agents in continuing efforts ahead, with what time he has left as a living creature. Perhaps Edwin Lindsey will, and perhaps Peter Jacob will, too, with what few months he has left before he, too, finally succumbs to the fumes of decay.

All of their time is still theirs, after all. Death itself is the only inevitability that Mantorok still has for them, simple and purposeless and therefore likewise only theirs.

Mantorok blinks again, watching as if watching light move across a wall, as Alex casts the summoning spell. Its eyes look across three realities and see the light of runes and Essences bending together into white. Its interest sharpens; between strikes, Magick surges. Essences manifest. Spirits manifest, and land blows against matter that even the gladius Alex was gifted by Michael cannot touch.

Despite its own lack of doubt as to how this will play out, Mantorok feels something inside of itself dispassionately warming. The _rightness_ of seeing the elements of a multi-step strategy converge, not dissimilar to feeling the magic in one’s matter when the planets align.

In time, the Essences shatter.

Mantorok sighs, long an sickly-bitter and acrid. All across the surface of the planet, stems wither black and insects’ wings fall silent and drop them still to the ground and creatures choke and collapse mid-breath and twitch as they succumb to the same poison of inevitability that brings millions of seeds to stir at it bleeding into the soil, invigorates the blood of a million creatures as they ingest it in the blood of the ones who’ve succumbed.

The sigh reaches into places that it cannot quite see.

It does not know which of its enemies are fighting where, but it can feel the life drain from their forms and seep into the sky as its poison takes hold; it can feel Alex releasing the first pawn’s spirit to be lain in reserve with the others’; it can hear Alex setting a new rune, and the cosmos going still, with an interdimensional return to no presence it isn’t used to.

And with that, it can rest.

It does, with another great sigh, shifting life and death over the Earth like mud over a dormant creature, going slack around the stakes that pin it to and seal its magic into the mortal plane.

It will need to lay traps for the versions of its foes who Alexandra bound, as well, eventually, or find methods with which to chase them to the planes into which they’ve been expelled. It can afford to rest, however - the time it has is eternal. This isn’t the first time it has been on the path to dying; it’ll buy itself more time whether it needs to or not, bubbling up from its own remains like everything it touches.

And whatever the means it chooses to eliminate the remains of its competition shall be easy, as well, beginning with the Magick that has been amassed in the Tome. With Ehn’gha’s Circle of Power.

Both, after all, are now in the unchallenged hands of the last of the Roivas family.

And she, Mantorok thinks, will be the last one who there ever needs to be.

* * *

Alexandra has a dream again.

There is no gun in her hands; only the enchanted gladius.

There are no skeletons surrounding her; only an image of herself in stone, standing before her.

Her face blanches, looking upon it, and remembering through a cold sweat the memories of Pious Augustus.

She lifts the gladius. Someone who she’s never been recognizes it, and recognizes what she must do. Her eyes steel as she looks up to the statue again.

She pulls the sword back and swings for the neck.

Images flash in her mind as they had done looking up at the Ancient in the sky. These ones, too, give her a rush of foreboding, and yet there is no fear - only exhilaration. The city of Ehn’gha is full of light; people in all manner of dress walk between buildings of an architecture that belongs to none of them.

She swings again, for an arm.

More people. One at the door to the mansion. One in the basement. One at the balcony over the city. One kneeling before her in the Circle of Power as she holds out the Tome - unable to see her face under a cowl, but knowing that it is her with the immediacy of familiarity. Another kneels, another, another.

She swings again.

A dead face looks up at her. Gray. In it are her own eyes, cold. She thinks of Anthony. She thinks of Ellia. She thinks of someone else, and something else, and as it stings her into screaming and thrashing another strike out at a limbless torso -

She wakes.

She is cold with her own sweat and her breath is fast, but she is determined.

Her limbs trembling with a vigor that has nowhere to go at anticipation of a sacrifice, muttering disbelief that this is the only way to complete a task she understands only in intuition alone in the suddenly-enormous reality that she _isn't done yet_ , she heads up from the study and ascends the foyer stairs to draw a bath.

* * *

Many miles deep below an old cathedral in France, at the very base of catacombs winding deep into catacombs, a forgotten rune glows yellow, stirred by the resonance of nine timeless, preserved souls.


End file.
